Tracking The Rise In Global Economic Inequality: New Evidence From The World Inequality

The first World Inequality Report (WIR2018), documents a sharp rise in global economic inequality since the 1980s despite strong growth in emerging economies. It also discusses country-to-country inequality trajectories (including UK’s wealth inequality dynamics) and highlights the importance of policy-making in the diverging trends observed across countries and world regions.

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The report, first launched in December last year at the Paris School of Economics, was coordinated by Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. It draws from new findings of the World Wealth and Income Database (a project which regroups more than 100 researchers all over the world) and provides the first systemic assessment of globalization in terms of income and wealth inequality since 1980.

Speakers: Lucas Chancel, Duncan Green, Rebecca Simson, Paul Segal

LSE Events - Tracking The Rise In Global Economic Inequality: New Evidence From The World Inequality

Transcript

Thank you very much Mike for that introduction. Thank you for the invitation. I'm really thrilled to be here today. Actually it's the first time I see the book in its present form so so I'm really delighted to be able to present this on the occasion of the launch of the book version of the report which was released a few months ago in its online forum. And now it's it's great to be able to to have it as a physical object so so I have about 40 minutes so let me just come the time here. Thank you. So basically this this presentation will be about the I will follow the general structure of the report and let me introduce this this talk by saying that this really is a collective work. So you see here that the report is coordinated by fact very due myself to my team and says Gabriel Zachmann. But it really draws on the work of dozens and dozens of scholars all over the world literally 100 researchers across all continents so this really is a collaborative cumulative work and it's an ongoing process so a lot of the stories that are presented in the report are being continued updated and as we speak feeding the database that underlies the report with no country So inequality is indeed one of the key challenges of our time.

And we believe that if it's not properly addressed it Jenee to various sorts of political social economic catastrophes but one of the first condition to two of the first conditions to properly tackle inequality is to monitor it properly and let's say at the onset we're still very far from having satisfactory measures of global income and wealth inequality. And this report tries to make a step forward in this direction but we're still far from the optimal point. So we already think that there are interesting useful navo results from the work that we have been of the past years. And this is what I'm going to present now so as I said we see what world the database underlying the report as the most extensive database on the historical evolution of income and wealth and this project regroups researches over the five continents one of the most important aspects of our work in our perspective is read the transparency dimension that is the series that we discussed can be accessed online with all the data sets computer codes technical papers that underlie this work so that everybody researchers non researchers can actually make their own mind on our series. Can we produce them if they want. And we also have tools to visualise inequality that are available open access and free on our website so this is really one of the core dimensions of our project opening economic research to the general public and to everybody and one of the main findings one of the main results that I discussed in the coming minutes is that we find that despite high growth in emerging countries since nineteen eighty we find rising global inequality among world individuals and we find that the top 1 percent income earners actually captured twice as much growth as the entire bottom 50 percent of the world population since 1950. Now the conclusion of this report is really not about pessimism in the face of these.

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